Never Forget That Bradley Manning, Not Gay Marriage, Is The Issue - by John Pilger

In the week Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he ordered bombing attacks on Yemen, killing a reported 63 people, 28 of them children. When Obama recently announced he supported same-sex marriage, American planes had not long blown 14 Afghan civilians to bits. In both cases, the mass murder was barely news. What mattered were the cynical vacuities of a political celebrity, the product of a zeitgeist driven by the forces of consumerism and the media with the aim of diverting the struggle for social and economic justice.

The award of the Nobel Prize to the first black president because he “offered hope” was both absurd and an authentic expression of the lifestyle liberalism that controls much of political debate in the west. Same-sex marriage is one such distraction. No “issue” diverts attention as successfully as this: not the free vote in Parliament on lowering the age of gay consent promoted by the noted libertarian and war criminal Tony Blair: not the cracks in “glass ceilings” that contribute nothing to women’s liberation and merely amplify the demands of bourgeois privilege.

Legal obstacles should not prevent people marrying each other, regardless of gender. But this is a civil and private matter; bourgeois acceptability is not yet a human right. The rights historically associated with marriage are those of property: capitalism itself. Elevating the “right” of marriage above the right to life and real justice is as profane as seeking allies among those who deny life and justice to so many, from Afghanistan to Palestine.

On 9 May, hours before his Damascene declaration on same-sex marriage, Obama sent out messages to campaign donors making his new position clear. He asked for money. In response, according to the Washington Post, his campaign received a “massive surge of contributions”. The following evening, with the news now dominated by his “conversion”, he attended a fundraising party at the Los Angeles home of the actor George Clooney. “Hollywood,” reported the Associated Press, “is home to some of the most high-profile backers of gay marriage, and the 150 donors who are paying $40,000 to attend Clooney’s dinner will no doubt feel invigorated by Obama’s watershed announcement the day before.” The Clooney party is expected to raise a record $15 million for Obama’s re-election and will be followed by “yet another fundraiser in New York sponsored by gay and Latino Obama supporters”.

The width of a cigarette paper separates the Democratic and Republican parties on economic and foreign policies. Both represent the super rich and the impoverishment of a nation from which trillions of tax dollars have been transferred to a permanent war industry and banks that are little more than criminal enterprises. Obama is as reactionary and violent as George W. Bush, and in some ways he is worse. His personal speciality is the use of Hellfire missile-armed drones against defenceless people. Under cover of a partial withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, he has sent US special forces to 120 countries where death squads are trained. He has revived the old cold war on two fronts: against China in Asia and with a “shield” of missiles aimed at Russia. The first black president has presided over the incarceration and surveillance of greater numbers of black people than were enslaved in 1850. He has prosecuted more whistleblowers – truth-tellers – than any of his predecessors. His vice-president, Joe Biden, a zealous warmonger, has called WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange a “hi-tech terrorist”. Biden has also converted to the cause of gay marriage.

One of America’s true heroes is the gay soldier Bradley Manning, the whistleblower alleged to have provided WikiLeaks with the epic evidence of American carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was the Obama administration that smeared his homosexuality as weird, and it was Obama himself who declared a man convicted of no crime to be guilty.

Who among the fawners and luvvies at Clooney’s Hollywood moneyfest shouted, “Remember Bradley Manning”? To my knowledge, no prominent spokesperson for gay rights has spoken against Obama’s and Biden’s hypocrisy in claiming to support same-sex marriage while terrorising a gay man whose courage should be an inspiration to all, regardless of sexual preference.

Obama’s historic achievement as president of the United States has been to silence the anti-war and social justice movement associated with the Democratic Party. Such deference to an extremism disguised by and embodied in a clever, amoral operator, betrays the rich tradition of popular protest in the US. Perhaps the Occupy movement is said to be in this tradition; perhaps not.

The truth is that what matters to those who aspire to control our lives is not skin pigment or gender, or whether or not we are gay, but the class we serve. The goals are to ensure that we look inward on ourselves, not outward to others and never comprehend the sheer scale of undemocratic power, and to that we collaborate in isolating those who resist. This attrition of criminalising, brutalising and banning protest can too easily turn western democracies into states of fear.

On 12 May, in Sydney, Australia, home of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a protest parade in support of gay marriage filled the city centre. The police looked on benignly. It was a showcase of liberalism. Three days later, there was to be a march to commemorate the Nakba (“The Catastrophe’), the day of mourning when Israel expelled Palestinians from their land. A police ban had to be overturned by the Supreme Court.

That is why the people of Greece ought to be our inspiration. By their own painful experience they know their freedom can only be regained by standing up to the German Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and their own quislings in Athens. People across Latin America have achieved this: the indignados of Bolivia who saw off the water privateers and the Argentinians who told the IMF what to do with their debt. The courage of disobedience was their weapon. Remember Bradley Manning.

May Day - by Noam Chomsky

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called, “Law Day”—a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labor movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energized by the Occupy movement’s organizing, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

If you’re a serious revolutionary, then you are not looking for an autocratic revolution, but a popular one which will move towards freedom and democracy. That can take place only if a mass of the population is implementing it, carrying it out, and solving problems. They’re not going to undertake that commitment, understandably, unless they have discovered for themselves that there are limits to reform.

A sensible revolutionary will try to push reform to the limits, for two good reasons. First, because the reforms can be valuable in themselves. People should have an eight-hour day rather than a twelve-hour day. And in general, we should want to act in accord with decent ethical values.

Secondly, on strategic grounds, you have to show that there are limits to reform. Perhaps sometimes the system will accommodate to needed reforms. If so, well and good. But if it won’t, then new questions arise. Perhaps that is a moment when resistance is a necessary step to overcome the barriers to justified changes. Perhaps the time has come to resort to coercive measures in defense of rights and justice, a form of self-defense. Unless the general population recognizes such measures to be a form of self-defense, they’re not going to take part in them, at least they shouldn’t.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions.

May Day started here, but then became an international day in support of American workers who were being subjected to brutal violence and judicial punishment.

Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a “law day” as defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future for the whole of society.

It's Time to Open the Black Boxes - By Yanis Varoufakis

From my man, Yanis Varoufakis: http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2012/04/13/its-time-to-open-the-black-boxes-thursday-april-19th-athens/#more-2031

Ignorance can, and often is, the price we must pay to live better. I do not need to know how my phone works to benefit from it. All I want is that when I dial Danae’s number it is Danae’s phone that rings. How the machines involved, both the individual phone and the network, achieve this is neither here nor there. Indeed, if I invested time and mental energy in understanding what exactly goes on in the various devices surrounding me, I would have to do without other types of understanding that I value a great deal more.
In engineering terms, I have just stated that, to me (as to most people), my phone is a black box: a device or system whose inner workings are opaque and whose only function I understand is how it turns inputs (e.g. my dialling a certain number) into outcomes (Danae’s phone ringing). Come to think of it, my wife’s mind is also, to my own mind, a black box: even if I were a leading neuroscientist, I would be utterly in the dark on the electro-chemical process that led her to put together this installation. Moreover, possibly because I know it to be an impossible task, I harbour no ambition to uninteresting truly this particular electro-chemical process. 
From this perspective, we are surrounded by black boxes. However, not all black boxes are as benign as my phone. Besides phones and humans, companies and states can also be seen as super black boxes. No CEO, let alone a more lowly manager, can ever get the full picture of how each and every decision is reached within his company. Bankers never truly understood the contents of the CDOs and the array of toxic derivatives their banks were churning out (and then hoarding to boot) as if there was no tomorrow. Taking matters onto a higher level, consider the example of the United States. More often than not the State Department, the White House, the relevant Senate Committees operate without much coordination with one another, yet manage to produce policies that the rest of the world recognises as… US ‘government’ policy.
The difference between these black boxes (CDOs, corporations, banks, government) from my humble phone is encapsulated in a single word: power. Not the type of power associated with electricity or the crushing force of the ocean but another, subtler, power: the power to write the agenda, to determine the conversation, to implant desires into our soul, to channel the flow of information along the existing grid of social power, to draw us into the network that determines how our society works and, alas, fails.
In 2008, our world descended in the cauldron of multiple, persistent, spectacular failures of the various power ‘networks’. Europe proved the weaker link and, within it, Greece the weakest. However, even before any of that transpired, our planet had entered an irreversible trajectory towards environmental degradation. With this multilayered Crisis upon us (its economic and environmental facets being the main but not only ones), and given the high concentration of power, it is almost tempting to attribute it to some sick conspiracy among the powerful. Images spring to mind of smoke filled rooms, with heavy furniture and cunning men (plus the odd woman) planning how they shall profit at the expense of the common good. These are, of course, delusions. If our sharply diminished circumstances are to be blamed on a conspiracy, then it is one whose conspirators do not even know that they are part of a conspiracy. That which feels to many like a conspiracy of the powerful is the emergent property of closed networks, of the super black boxes of social power.
Super black boxes take many different forms but, in essence, they are similar: Whenever a politician in the know gives a journalist an exclusive in exchange for a particular spin on the goings on, the said journalist is appended, subconsciously, to a network of insiders. Networks of social power thus control the flow of information in a manner that excludes, co-opts and guides its individual members. They evolve organically, as if under their own steam, and guided by a supra-intentional drive that no individuals, not even the President, the CEO, the persons manning the pivotal nodes, can control.
The key to power networks is exclusion, opacity. If some bank’s employee comes by inside information that is potentially damaging to the bank, whistle blowing, e.g. leaking it to the press, will immediately dissipate her chance at keeping some ‘power’ to herself. But, if she exchanges that ‘secret’ with private information held by some other cog in the machine of finance, then the power of this spontaneously generated pair is multiplied many-fold. This two person de facto conspiracy then forms alliances, via further information exchanges, with other such groups. The result is a network of power within other pre-existing networks involving participants who conspire de facto without being conscious, conspirators. Fascinatingly, some network members, the ones that are only loosely attached to the network, are utterly oblivious of the network that they reinforce (courtesy of having very few contacts with it).
Conceived of as ‘networks of power’, as ‘conspiracies without conspirators’, the powers-that-be with the power to control our lives (the state, corporations, the media, banks, organised pressure groups etc.) are nothing more than a pile of super black boxes: No one understands how they function, not even the individuals at their helm. Yet they are the ones that convert all of our inputs into social, economic and environmental outcomes. Crucially, unlike our phones (that we may legitimately not give a damn to understand; to open up and inspect their inner workings), opening these super-black boxes has now become a prerequisite to the survival of decency, of whole strata of our fellow humans, of our planet even. Put simply, we have run out of excuses. IT IS, therefore, TIME TO OPEN THE BLACK BOXES!
Why now? Why at all? Which boxes should we open? We need to open the black boxes now because 2008 was our generation’s 1929. Moreover, the past decade has seen the effective brewing of an environmental Armageddon. Unlike my phone that works perfectly, and which I have no cause to open up, our global social economy is broken. And so is our planet’s environment. The super black boxes that have been running the show since the 1970s are kaput. No longer able to auto-correct, powerless to reproduce conditions for decent living, these super black boxes must either be opened up or they will consume us, and the generations to come, into some dystopic black hole.
How should we do it? First, we need to acquire a readiness to recognise that we may very well, each one of us, be a node in the network; an ignorant de facto conspirator. Secondly, and this is the genius of Wikileaks, if we can get inside the network, like Theseus entering the Labyrinth, and disrupt the information flow; if we can put the fear of uncontrollable information leaking in the mind of as many of its members as possible, then the unaccountable, malfunctioning networks of power will collapse under their own weight and irrelevance. And then humanity will get another chance to organise an escape from its current cul de sac. Thirdly, by desisting any tendency to substitute old closed networks with new ones.
None of this will be easy. The networks will respond violently, as they are already doing. They will turn more authoritarian, more closed, more fragmented. But this is OK. They will, no doubt, close up and fragment in order to stop the ‘break-ins’. They will expend greater effort at hindering the opening of their black boxes. They will become increasingly preoccupied with their own ‘security’ and monopoly of information, less trusting of common people. However, the more they move in this direction the more seriously they shall deplete their capacity to attract and centralise that which makes them tick: fresh, untainted, plentiful information from people that have not yet been co-opted.
None of this is, of course, new. In his fabled The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli, an early exemplar amongst the advisers to the powers-that-be, advised his Prince  never to allow the popolo a glimpse of what evils were brewing inside the black boxes of his time.[i] His was, admittedly, a more innocent time when it was still excusable to think that centralised  power and information would smoothen humanity’s passage to the good society. Tragically, the tide has gone out on such optimism. State-controlled centralisation got its comeuppance with communism’s collapse in 1991, a turn of events that saw the multiplication and reinforcement of the ‘other’ side’s black boxes, with the Crash of 2008 being the natural conclusion of such hubris. Today, amidst the pessimism of our post-2008, to quote Slavoj Zizek, “we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures,[ii] the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised.”
Danae Stratou’s new installation goes one step beyond shaming and exposing. It turns the black boxes into art objects that simultaneously encapsulate our angst and hopes, our helplessness and our capacities, our inhuman constraints and human capabilities. Her opened boxes act as a subversive incitement not only to counter our fears and the powers-that-be at once but, additionally, to fashion ideas of new forms of shared power and prosperity.
Yanis Varoufakis

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[i] Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow until everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found.
(The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli [1469-1527])

Depression And Democracy - by Paul Krugman

Below is a piece by Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman...
... in entirety because there is a whole load of sleepwalking going down.

"It's time to start calling the current situation what it is: a depression. True, it's not a full replay of the Great Depression, but that's cold comfort. Unemployment in both America and Europe remains disastrously high. Leaders and institutions are increasingly discredited. And democratic values are under siege.

On that last point, I am not being alarmist. On the political as on the economic front it's important not to fall into the "not as bad as" trap. High unemployment isn't O.K. just because it hasn't hit 1933 levels; ominous political trends shouldn't be dismissed just because there's no Hitler in sight.

Let's talk, in particular, about what's happening in Europe - not because all is well with America, but because the gravity of European political developments isn't widely understood.

First of all, the crisis of the euro is killing the European dream. The shared currency, which was supposed to bind nations together, has instead created an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.

Specifically, demands for ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth, have done double damage. They have failed as economic policy, worsening unemployment without restoring confidence; a Europe-wide recession now looks likely even if the immediate threat of financial crisis is contained. And they have created immense anger, with many Europeans furious at what is perceived, fairly or unfairly (or actually a bit of both), as a heavy-handed exercise of German power.

Nobody familiar with Europe's history can look at this resurgence of hostility without feeling a shiver. Yet there may be worse things happening.

Right-wing populists are on the rise from Austria, where the Freedom Party (whose leader used to have neo-Nazi connections) runs neck-and-neck in the polls with established parties, to Finland, where the anti-immigrant True Finns party had a strong electoral showing last April. And these are rich countries whose economies have held up fairly well. Matters look even more ominous in the poorer nations of Central and Eastern Europe.

Last month the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development documented a sharp drop in public support for democracy in the "new E.U." countries, the nations that joined the European Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not surprisingly, the loss of faith in democracy has been greatest in the countries that suffered the deepest economic slumps.

And in at least one nation, Hungary, democratic institutions are being undermined as we speak.

One of Hungary's major parties, Jobbik, is a nightmare out of the 1930s: it's anti-Roma (Gypsy), it's anti-Semitic, and it even had a paramilitary arm. But the immediate threat comes from Fidesz, the governing center-right party.

Fidesz won an overwhelming Parliamentary majority last year, at least partly for economic reasons; Hungary isn't on the euro, but it suffered severely because of large-scale borrowing in foreign currencies and also, to be frank, thanks to mismanagement and corruption on the part of the then-governing left-liberal parties. Now Fidesz, which rammed through a new Constitution last spring on a party-line vote, seems bent on establishing a permanent hold on power.

The details are complex. Kim Lane Scheppele, who is the director of Princeton's Law and Public Affairs program - and has been following the Hungarian situation closely - tells me that Fidesz is relying on overlapping measures to suppress opposition. A proposed election law creates gerrymandered districts designed to make it almost impossible for other parties to form a government; judicial independence has been compromised, and the courts packed with party loyalists; state-run media have been converted into party organs, and there's a crackdown on independent media; and a proposed constitutional addendum would effectively criminalize the leading leftist party.

Taken together, all this amounts to the re-establishment of authoritarian rule, under a paper-thin veneer of democracy, in the heart of Europe. And it's a sample of what may happen much more widely if this depression continues.

It's not clear what can be done about Hungary's authoritarian slide. The U.S. State Department, to its credit, has been very much on the case, but this is essentially a European matter. The European Union missed the chance to head off the power grab at the start - in part because the new Constitution was rammed through while Hungary held the Union's rotating presidency. It will be much harder to reverse the slide now. Yet Europe's leaders had better try, or risk losing everything they stand for.

And they also need to rethink their failing economic policies. If they don't, there will be more backsliding on democracy - and the breakup of the euro may be the least of their worries."

And with that we wish you a happy solstice cos we're out of here...